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When the App Store says to redownload all your apps

It started well after I had successfully migrated to my new Mac. One morning, there were four updates shown in the App Store. When I clicked to download and install them all, a little later the App Store had given up, and told me they had to be downloaded again from the store.

According to the App Store Help book, this iCloud symbol when used in the App Store app means that item has to be ‘redownloaded’. The strange thing was that each of those four apps was still in my Applications folder, claiming it had just been updated to the latest version. And each seemed to run fine too.

So I clicked on the iCloud icons, and they just sat and spun 3/4 circles forever.

A day or so later, I gave up trying to get any sense out of the App Store, so restarted. A few minutes later, the App Store remained stuck in this undocumented limbo. To my surprise, a couple of days on, another update appeared. I clicked to download and install it, and it too seemed to go the same way.

Then the App Store miraculously changed. Every single app that I had ever purchased, apart from a couple which were still running at the time, now showed the same redownload icon. But every one of those apps still launched and ran perfectly normally from Applications.

Another day or two passed, and the App Store had clearly decided that it wasn’t going to crack me. I hadn’t tried downloading any of the many apps which it told me had to be redownloaded, and they all continued to work. Then suddenly they returned to normal – apart from a few old versions which were genuinely not installed on this Mac.

Over this period, I had no interruptions to my internet connection, and I remained logged into my iCloud account, which functioned quite healthily. I can only conclude that this is just something that Mojave’s App Store app is prone to. So if your apps suddenly need redownloading, have patience, let the App Store work it out of its system. And above all, provided you can still use the apps that you want, don’t panic.

Postscript:

Never think the App Store has finished messing you around. Within a day of writing this article, it has decided that I have to redownload every single app again. I’ll wait a while longer before even bothering to respond.

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8Comments

Thank you for this report.
Have you checked if this is true only for migrated systems or also for new Macs?
I mean, I buy a new Mac and install 20 apps that I had already bought on a previous Mac.
Will they show the same issue?

Still… I feel afraid of upgrading to Mojave even if I know I’ll have to do sooner or later as Xcode 10 on HS doesn’t support CoreML 😦

Maybe it could be even better to have an external SSD with Mojave and run it from there…

I have no idea whether it affects other Macs, whether migrated or not. I didn’t happen before 10.14.2, and my migration apparently went well, and many of the apps which I was told I had to redownload I had already used quite a lot. And they continued to work, despite what the App Store said.
I’d caution you about running Mojave from an external SSD: dual-booting with High Sierra isn’t a good plan, and booting Mojave from an external drive is often reported as being very slow.
Generally, it’s still an excellent release of macOS, as far as I’m concerned. But some parts like the App Store really suck.
Howard.

I downloaded all my MAS apps when I moved to a new MBP (no migration, manual data transfer), but I was still on High Sierra then. After upgrading to Mojave, the problems began: most of these apps don’t appear in the list of updates, when there’s an update. The only way is to delete the app from your applications folder and in the MAS click on the download button to re-install the updated version. And I need to do that again and again every time there’s a new update. Some call this “Apple Core Rot”, and it’s another sign of the slow but steady downward slope macOS has been on for many years.

Joss,
Your problems are quite different from what I experienced with the App Store. The weird thing here is that, despite what the App Store was saying, all those apps worked fine. But it would have been easy to panic and wasted days downloading the scores of apps which I have here.
Far from being on any downward slope, Mojave has so far done very much better than High Sierra. By this time in addition to 2 scheduled updates, High Sierra had had at least two Supplemental Updates and other patches to fix gross security and other bugs – and that was after cancelling APFS support for most Mac hardware at the last minute.
Howard.

[…] Store has had its issues over the past few months, but it seems Apple is fixing problems gradually. This article describes how to download and re-download Apps from the App Store. The article also mentions problems with […]